So I am seeing one crafting body for each craft with 5 materia each all being sold by the same retainer. The stats are Cont 3,2 and Craft 5,5,5. Is there a new way to get materia on gear more reliably? I can only imagine how much this person spent to get 5 materia on each piece of gear.

If they played a lot, yeah. Thing is, once you get past the initial materia slots of an item, the chance of successfully melding begins to drop exponentially. I think it's something like 45:22:8% depending on the extra added, give or take some variability. To slap on those last 3 would probably take a few dozen materia per piece of gear short of some insane luck. If this guy had hack swapped items or exploited leves as had been allegedly possible, then materia supply would be a non-issue. However, creating that many +craftmanship on your own would take a while.

I think I will put in a report, I've spent over a 100k one time on the 4th slot and failed every meld and this was around 19% success rate. Making your own materia at tier 3 or above would take a really long time, then on top of that the person has to successfully place those items on. 1 crafters top on the market, yeah I consider that time invested, but all of the crafters tops with all the good materia on it O.O

Chances are they are a player from 1.0 who hoarder all of their old materia. An fix buddy of mine hoarded all the materia he could during 1.0 and he began 2.0 with over 240 tier 4 cracked materia. I can't put into words how jealous I was of him. If it's a legacy server, then he probably did it legitimately and won't ever get his money out of it unless he was lucky while melding it. If it's a non legacy server, then he probably spent tons of Gil making it and he's going to try and price it over what he spent making it and can't sell it.